After upgrading to Slackware 11.0 from 10.2, ALSA can't seem to configure itself and I can't get any sound, even as root. This wasn't a problem in 10.2; all I had to do then was to run alsaconf and it would automatically detect and configure everything.

When running alsaconf as root and no X sessions open, I keep getting error messages relating to missing drivers for "legacy" devices. In the end run alsaconf says that it was unable to find the drivers and quits unsuccessfully.

I've tried installing all alsa- and oss-related packages from linuxpackages.net as well as from the Slackware homepage, but this seems to have no effect.

I've also tried enabling all sound-related options in the kernel (which made for a very large kernel with long compile time) and that didn't do anything either.

My only guess for this is that the drivers for my sound chip are no longer available from the default package.

I really don't know much about how sound works in Linux; I've never had any serious trouble with it until now. Is there anything I can do?

System specs: See #2 in sig

Hello :-)
Try to compile the kernel with soundcard support as a module (choosing M). then if your soundcard is PCI, enable ALL pci drivers and disable the ISA ones.
you don't need any extra package for alsa to work. rather check and make sure that while upgrading to Slack 11.00 the new alsa package was installed.
after booting in the newly compiled kernel, run alsaconf.
hope this solves your problem.

Thank you for the reply!

Unfortunately, my sound card is not PCI (I don't think; it's some obscure chipset on the MB) and all sound options are already modularized (according to the Sound catagory from make menuconfig in /usr/src/linux).

Remember alsa modules are kernel specific.
Which kernel are you runnning now? Did you compile it yourself? If you did, don't forget to run make modules && make modules_install
Check that /usr/src/linux actually contains the source of the kernel you're using now or it will be useless to compile them there.

Another approach is just to get alsa-drivers (be sure other alsa stuff matches the version) from www.alsa-project.org and compile them, they'll install fine

How do I know if I'm using the right source? Where would I look to find it if not /usr/src/linux ? Also, yes, I've done make modules && make modules_install.

Normally, /usr/src/linux is just a symlink to the kernel source. You can find out which kernel you're running with uname, and to know the version in the sources, open Makefile with a text editor.
Anyway, I'd recommend you to get the sources from alsa-project and compile them yourself, they'll create the modules correctly according to the running kernel.

I downloaded all the latest alsa packages (1.0.13) and installed each of them in the usual way, saving alsa-drivers for last.

As far as I can tell, every one of those packages installed fine (I resorted to writing a crude script to install the packages in alsa-tools, so I'm not completely sure about those). However, when I try to install alsa-drivers, ./configure works fine, but make does NOT. It ends with an error about a symbol called "this_object_must_be_defined_as_objs_export_in_the_makefile" not being defined or something like that.

I tried make install anyway just to see what would happen. After running it, alsaconf gets a little farther than before, but it still can't find the right driver(s).

Also, what did you mean earlier when you said to disable all ISA in the kernel? Which options are those?

Okay...I had ALSA working for a second there, but now it's broken again.

Here's what I did: After I installing as much of the alsa-*-1.0.13 packages from their website I installed an old alsa-drivers-1.0.11.tgz that I had lying around from a previous attempt. After doing this I was able to activate and configure my soundcard with alsaconf and set volumes. Everything was finally working.

...then I noticed WINE wasn't working. According to a post I read before it was because WINE doesn't work with 2.4 kernels anymore. So I downloaded and installed the 2.6 kernel sources, enabled as many sound options for ALSA in it as I could, compiled and installed the bzImage + modules (make, su root, make modules_install, cp .../boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz26, /sbin/lilo)

Now I'm back to square one. However, this is a new, seperate issue now, so I'll start a new thread for it.

Thank you for your help! Your solution actually did help a little; I don't think reinstalling alsa-drivers-1.0.11 would've worked had I not installed the newer *.13 packages.

It's the alsa-drivers which cause the problems. The others can be installed as binary packages and don't even have to be the same version AFAIK.
When you compile alsa-drivers they get installed into the module tree for the kernel you are running at compile time.
Instead of using the latest versions, you'll have better luck by using an older version. I'd suggest using the sources from the version that was used in Slack-10.2.
If you are compiling your own kernel, I'd suggest hard-linking sound support -not compiled as a module, even if you deselect all the OSS sound drivers available in the kernel.

Nevermind; I tried turning off OSS completely in the kernel and re-activating as many ALSA components as I could, saying M to just about everything (including basic sound support). That seemed to work, though I can't understand why; last time I tried that it didn't do very much. My guess is that it's because I re-installed the alsa-driver .tgz that came with Slack 11 just before recompiling this time.

Anyway, thanks for your help, everyone!